Just as California’s billionaires would prefer, the public conversation around a proposed one-time tax on a fraction of their immense wealth has become centered on a single threat: They’ll leave and take their money with them if the tax passes.
It’s a wild notion unsupported by history, but you can expect to hear more about it all the way to the Nov. 3 general election. That is partly because the billionaires themselves are spending huge in an effort to defeat the measure — with some of the largest contributions coming from those, like Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who claim they’ve already fled the state.
